Fox boss ordered staff to cast doubt on climate science

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You are incorrect, actually. I would be willing to bet that you have no idea where marshall's data came from. And as has already been explained to you, a satisfactory case against the climate scientists simply has not been made.

I wouldn't even bother arguing anymore. The entire earth could literally be engulfed in flames, and he'd still by crying about the supposedly flawed data (assuming he was alive).

You should have read more carefully.

Maybe the people making the challenge are guilty of slandering the scientific community? Have you ever considered that? You know there are a lot of people out there with a great motive to slander climate scientists. They see the future climate treaties, carbon taxes, etc. as potentially harming their financial interests.

Anyways, I was presenting a case to Ruveyn, not you. I don't see the point in arguing with someone who thinks 99.9% of climate scientists are essentially liars. You are on par with people who claim the US lunar landing was fabricated by NASA. Take off your tin foil hat already.

The fact that the Greenland ice sheet is getting thicker at the highest elevations does not indicate that the earth is not warming.

Elevations above 1500 meters are nearly a mile (or more) above sea level. In the troposphere temperature drops at a rate of approximately 6 degrees Celsius per Kilometer, therefore the temperature will be at least 9 degrees C (16 degrees F) cooler at elevations above 1500 meters compared to the corresponding temperature at sea level. In reality the temperature difference can be even bigger than this due to the fact that ice caps reflect anywhere from 40 to 85 percent of incoming solar radiation compared to 6-10 percent for open water. Because of all this the thick, high elevation region of the Greenland ice cap remains below freezing for the majority of the year and the vast majority of the annual precipitation falls in the form of snow regardless of the warming trend.

Because of the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, warmer air (even if still below freezing) can contain more water vapor than cooler air. Therefore precipitation over the high elevations of Greenland increases with a warming climate. This leads to a slight thickening of the ice cap at elevations above 1500 meters. Thus thickening of the top of the Greenland ice cap is in fact a symptom of a warming trend.

However, as the temperature gets higher, melting at lower elevations, where more precipitation falls in the form of rain, will eventually overwhelm the thickening at the top, leading to an overall decrease in ice mass.

And you guys say I'm an ideologue...

You are an ideologue and publishing accusations that a huge number of scientists are essentially liars (i.e. manipulating data) without any real evidence is slander.

marshall is presenting scientific data. Unless you believe reality has a liberal bias, I don't see how that makes him an ideologue.

Maybe he just didn't understand my explanation of how a warming climate could cause the Greenland ice cap to thicken by increasing the amount of frozen precipitation that falls on top of it. When ice caps melt they melt primarily from the sides, not from the top.

And what were the natural drivers for the warming trend. Has orbital variation, axis tilt, solar output and cloud formation from cosmic radiation been properly eliminated as natural causes? What about volcanic activity? Climate variation is a highly non-linear process with some interesting feedback modifiers. Is climate science that far advanced? Hell, we can't predict weather more 10 days in advance, even with all the fancy computers.

ruveyn

You are being disingenuous, ruveyn. You know that the models have indeed included all those factors you mentioned, and that there is a difference between weather and climate.

When climate "science" is as well based as the Standard Model of Particles and Fields (which predicts correctly to 12 significant digits) I will believe the "models". The so-called climate "science" which is largely based on statistically cooked data is at best dubious in quality. The natural climate drivers have not been properly eliminated as causes.

Now answer me this. Why was it warmer during the medieval warm period before there was industry. What warmed the climate? Answer: the natural drivers. Answer me this: He do we know that carbon dioxide lives lead warming rather than following warming? Is there heavy duty proof? What properly controlled experiments have been used to validate climate "science". Can we reproduce climate in proper laboratory controlled conditions?

Be sure to write us when climate "science" is as good as the Standard Model.

I am disinclined to let my standard of living and my health and my prosperity and perhaps my life be based on anything less.

ruveyn

Your own personal bias has left you clueless as to the research and study of climate scientists (no quotes!). Of course they've studied the natural drivers, well beyond even your own imagination. What do you even know about the models? Can you state, with confidence, that you have personal knowledge of the inputs? Also, it's not as we're talking about a bunch of quasi-scientists sitting in front of a computer screen and waiting for the model runs, as you seem to think. Climate scientists are chemists, mathematicians, physicists, biologists, etc., and they use all of the tools that science has to offer, including controlled experiments.

For a more in depth look at CO2, please see the following:

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/schmidt_05/

The text in the above link will help you to understand this:



[img][800:781]http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/schmidt_05/curve_s.gif[/img]

These have been eliminated. Orbital and axis tilt variations are too slow to cause the current rate of temperature rise and solar output has actually decreased since 1940. There hasn't been a large enough volcanic eruption in the past few centuries to cause anything more than a transient cooling (in the case of Pinatubo in 1991 the resultant global temperature depression lasted only 12-18 months). It would take something on the scale of a Yellowstone eruption to cause multi-decade climate changes.


You are correct that day-to-day is a chaotic system with exponential divergence of numerical solutions on a time scale of 1-3 weeks. However, weather is mainly a turbulent mixing process in which total energy is largely conserved. The energetic forcing for weather, namely the differential heating between the equator and poles, is a fairly stable function of the solar zenith angle, surface and atmospheric radiative qualities, and the location of semi-permanent ocean currents.

The main gist is that just because day-to-day weather patterns numerically diverge on a time scale of 1-3 weeks doesn't mean climate patterns will diverge on that time scale. The total radiative energy budget of the planet doesn't have a strong dependence on day-to-day weather. It does, however, have a rather large dependence on the level of greenhouse gases that absorb radiation within the infrared spectral window. It also has a large dependence on the geography of surface absorption/reflection. As sea ice decreases the polar oceans reflect less sunlight which is a positive feedback.

That is true. Climate is weather averaged out over long time intervals and some of the non-linear jitters are smoothed. However, the underlying mechanism of climate is as scientifically intractable as weather. We do not have a mechanism or even a well behaved underlying model as we do for quantum physics (which is linear at its core complete with superposition of states). What we have are statistical models. Unfortunately these models are not overdetermined, as a proper scientific theory should be. They have many parameters to fiddle. In effect, climate "science" is as afflicted with epicyles as was Ptolemy's cosmology.

I look forward to real climate science being developed one day. That day has not arrived. Yet we are expected to tie our well being to an ill developed not yet science of climate.

ruveyn

There is no evidence that the medieval warm period was global. Some proxies show that temperatures in Western Europe and the North Atlantic peaked somewhere near or slightly above the present in the middle ages. However, proxy temperature records from other parts of the world have no medieval warm period and show current temperatures being higher than ever.


You can't really compare climate changes during glacial periods to the current warming trend. Past changes were likely due to a combination of Milankovitch cycles, melt-freeze surface albedo feedback processes, and to a lesser extent ocean current fluctuations. Here CO2 lagged warming as other factors where driving the change. However the change occuring during the past century shows CO2 leading rather than lagging the warming. If anything, this is evidence that the current trend is unique and not natural.